SRI International joins DARPA program to teach AI ‘memory’ recall

SRI International, creator of Apple’s Siri, has joined the Lifelong-Learning Machines research program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the innovation arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. SRI plans to train AI to play Starcraft and mimic memory recall in dreams. The goal is to explore how AI systems can be trained to react to scenarios it hasn’t been given training data to recognize; to act based on prior knowledge or experience. Known for short as L2M, university participants from academia in the DARPA program were announced earlier this month, but SRI International is one of the only known companies to participate. Additional companies will take part in the initiative to train AI to learn and remember things, a DARPA spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email, however a full list was not provided by the time this story was published. SRI International’s lifelong learning work will focus on training AI to imitate human memory recall, and how to decide what information is worth remembering and what information should be discarded. Part of this will be explored through the emulation of the human brain when dreaming. “We actually in our work try to base some on the biological mechanisms in sleep, so when we sleep we recall certain memories we play back in terms of dreams, and the dreams in a way reinforces it or we decide at that point it no longer jives with all the other things that we’ve learned, so it’s a biological mechanism that we are… [Read full story]